CPRE: wrong homes in wrong places

“New paper shows Government focus on meeting market demand is failing to provide homes people need

A new paper published today by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) argues that the Government’s continuing failure to prioritise genuine local housing needs over market demand will perpetuate the housing crisis while wasting precious countryside [1].

CPRE’s Needless Demand analyses the current method that councils use to plan for local housing and what is being built as a result. It finds that ‘housing need’ and ‘housing demand’ are being conflated in planning policy, with the result that sheer numbers matter more than type and tenure of housing.

CPRE had hoped that the Government’s new consultation on housing – Planning for the right homes in the right places, published last Thursday – would clearly distinguish between genuine local needs and market demand [2]. In calling for a standardised approach to identifying the needs of different social groups, the Government took some steps towards this.

Yet the general thrust of the Government’s plans was to argue that high-demand areas will have to accept more homes to improve the affordability of the housing market. CPRE sees this as neither building the right homes, nor building them in the right places. The likely result is profitable executive homes built on precious countryside in the south east, rather than building what communities across the country actually need. …”